Wrong place, wrong time robbery suspect

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Does anyone have worse timing than 60-year-old Stephen Richard Holmes? The convicted felon was busted for robbing a San Francisco bank, just as he happened to be walking near the same bank weeks later — as someone else was robbing it, authorities say.

It all began the afternoon of Dec. 15, when an older man with salt-and-pepper hair walked into the Cathay Bank at 540 Montgomery St. and demanded money from a teller while keeping one of his hands in his coat pocket, as if simulating a weapon. “Give me your fives, tens, fifties and hundreds!” the robber told the teller, FBI Special Agent Richard Anderson wrote in an affidavit filed this week in U.S. District Court in San Francisco.

The teller slipped a dye pack in with the cash. As the robber fled, the pack exploded, turning the money a crimson red and unusable. The robber dropped most of the $2,850 and ran, Anderson wrote.

Fast-forward to Dec. 30, when the same bank was robbed by a different person. Police officers converged, saw Holmes nearby and arrested him, noticing that his salt-and-pepper hair matched the description of the robber from Dec. 15, according to Anderson.

The cops learned that Holmes was being sought on a warrant for escaping from a halfway house in San Diego, authorities said. Holmes had been sent there after serving a sentence of nearly 11 years for a previous bank-robbery conviction, court records show.

At the Hall of Justice, Holmes admitted that he was the person shown in surveillance photographs taken during the Dec. 15 robbery, Anderson said. But he made one thing clear: He didn’t recall having robbed the bank “because he is an alcoholic and routinely drinks alcohol to the point that he ‘blacks out,’ ” Anderson wrote.

So why was Holmes near the bank Dec. 30? “Coincidental,” Anderson wrote.